A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Penguin) - Charles Dickens [190]
Many counties added police forces during the 1850s and ’60s, and as statistics began to be gathered in more scientific ways during the Victorian period, civil administrators discussed methods for the prevention of crime, especially youth crime, the evidence as to whether or not crime rates were falling, and to what was owed that social progress. The expansion of education, the police, and increasing employment opportunities all were believed to have contributed. As in current penal theory, controversial subjects included the causes of recidivism and the effectiveness of incarceration as a deterrence for criminal activity.
The prison is one of the dominant images of Dickens’s imaginative work. Dickens wrote several features explicitly about prisons that were published in Household Words. The best known, perhaps, is his strong condemnation of solitary confinement in chapter 7 of American Notes for General Circulation (1842), written after his travels to the United States. While traveling briefly through Philadelphia, Dickens visited public institutions there, including a hospital, a library, the Exchange and post office, and a prison. According to Dickens, the Eastern Penitentiary’s system is “rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement.” Dickens believes the Eastern Penitentiary intends to be humane, but, he says, “I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing.” Dickens imagines the tortures of solitary confinement:
I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it exhorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. [. . .] He sees the prison-officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.
His description of the Philadelphia prison, excepting that he believes the prison officials to have “excellent motives,” is very like the man “buried alive” in A Tale of Two Cities, Dr. Manette. In another passage, Dickens imagines the stages of reaction to solitary imprisonment—from stunned, to despairing, to stupor. “Give me some work to do, or I shall go raving mad!” he supposes the prisoner exclaiming, when his grated door is opened.
The prison is evident thematically in many of his novels besides A Tale of Two Cities, most obviously the Marshalsea debtors prison of Little Dorrit, and the Newgate prison in Barnaby Rudge, which, like A Tale of Two Cities, depicts a crowd breaking it open. As critics such as A. O. J. Cockshut have discussed, the image of the prison and the felt experience of the prisoner are related to the determining force of other institutions represented in Dickens’s fiction—not only claustrophobic houses, such as Satis House in Great Expectations, but also the workhouses in Oliver Twist and Squeers’ boarding school in Nicholas